Manong Ken's Recipe of the Month - June 2000

Steamed Fish

Once in a while, I find a whole fish - either fresh or frozen - in the supermarket ... but I always hesitate to buy it because I just don't know how to cook it ... until I learned how to do a decent steamed fish easily.

Here's how you do it ...

Clean the fish of course - make sure to remove the scales by scraping them with a knife (or use a fish scaler) - if the fish hasn't been de-scaled. Also, slit the stomach open and empty the entrails if you don't want those. You need a lot of ginger, sliced very thin, soy sauce, lots of onions, green onions if possible, some sliced tomatoes, a little bit of cilantro leaves, and mushrooms. You also need a little bit of salt too.

On a plate, arrange a bed of vegetables for the fish - ginger, onions, tomatoes, mushroom etc. on which you lay the fish on. Before putting the fish on top of the vegetable bed, rub the outer surface with salt, then lay it on top of the veggies. Cover the fish with more ginger, onions, tomatoes, mushroom etc. Sprinke with soy sauce if you want.

If you have a bamboo steamer, just place the plate inside the steamer and steam. If you don't, construct one. You need to have a wok for this though. Basically, arrange three or four forks as struts to lift the plate when placed inside the wok. Put water in wok through the space between the plate and wok. Cover wok. Light the fire and steam - probably 20-30 minutes.

That's it. You can make sweet and sour sauce on the side to make your steamed fish an escabeche. The easiest way to make sweet and sour sauce is to use the juice of canned sliced pineapple (or pineapple juice) as base, mix with a little bit of catsup for coloring, and about a table spoon of corn starch. Make sure to dissolve the corn starch in a little of water before mixing with the juice otherwise you will have a lumpy sauce. Heat to thicken. You may even add your pineapple chunks while heating. Pour over fish ...

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